00:00:00 Welcome to episode 683 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm David Smith author of who's got your back making and keeping great friendships among men. I encourage you to invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talents and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to build real lasting friendships as a man is vital to doing this.
00:00:31 And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with the leadership provided by Scott Mayer. You can more easily. I'm not going to make a lie here and say that it's simple and easy and everything will fall into place. And it all is perfect because it's not that way. It is work. You have to overcome a certain amount of inertia that your body and your mind has all the time that resist being able to move towards these longterm goals.
00:01:10 In fact, that's what it's actually called by another Arthur in the war of art is the resistance welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true color. In the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:32 We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's episode about investing in others. By stewarding your time. I talk with you about why we are often not rational and how we view our time, why this matters and how you can recognize, and even modify your view of time. As we talk about stewarding your time,
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00:02:25 just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. This week. I've been thinking a lot about irrationality, this idea that we are rational beings. You know, we talked about it a little bit on Monday's episode with Len about how the truth is. We have these theories that depend on human beings being rational in their approach to money and their approach to time and their approach to other things.
00:02:55 And yet the truth is we are often not really rational. Instead, we tend to approach things from an emotional basis. First, we need to think about how we feel before we think about what we do. And I'm going to focus on a little bit on how that affects us and use the framework of a, another book called predictably irrational by Dan areola.
00:03:19 One of my greatest Arthur's, I, I love this book. It's really affected how I've used things and this idea that we can look at time and not be really rational in how we approach things. And I'll give you an example. What, often times we look at something and we set a very important, long term goal. We, we know that there's something that's important to us.
00:03:44 It's, it's something that we, we really want to do. It's something where we look at it and we go, this is important. Maybe it's, it's getting healthy in the new year and going to the gym and exercising more and getting physically fit, or are beginning to jog in the mornings or our exercise for 30 minutes in the morning, these sorts of goals about our longterm health.
00:04:06 You know, we begin to see ourselves age and not feel as well. And we know it's important to eat, right, and to exercise and to do the things that we're supposed to do. And yet we procrastinate on those goals. We often look at it and we look at the short term pleasure as more important than the longterm goal. We, we aren't able to delay our gratification and see the future state.
00:04:33 Instead, what we do is we sleep a little later in the morning, we eat a little more sweets in the afternoon. We put off going to the gym and pretty soon we haven't done the things that we needed to do and years can go by. We don't have a rational view of how, what we do today affects us in the future. We don't really view time in that way.
00:04:58 And, and the book predictably irrational basically explains this. As we have two States, we have a hot state in a cold state and in the cold state, we're very logical. We're able to think about longterm consequences. We're able to make plans. We're able to set goals, but in the warm state, we are just living in the moment. We're in an emotional state and we can't really see our project.
00:05:22 What the future state will look like from an emotional standpoint, we can't judge how we will feel at that new state, because we're not familiar with it yet, where you're only living in the present emotional state and we can't project into the future. And because of that, we can't really set these long term goals in a way that we're often successful at.
00:05:49 And this matters because oftentimes these longer term things are the most important goals. Their financial goals are physical, they're relational goals. They're things that really matter, but we find ourselves just putting them off and putting them off and putting them off and never getting to even start on the much less, leave them. If you've set this up new year's resolution three or four or five or six years in a row,
00:06:15 then you've seen this play out in your own life. And so what does this say to do about it? What, what can we do about it? What, what can we do to make these goals more likely to be achieved? And the truth is that a lot of it comes down to things you've heard me talk about before. That's why I talk about them.
00:06:37 You know, the truth is if you commit upfront to a preferred course of action. So in other words, if you set a very detailed set of goals and exactly what you're going to do, and the more detail you give it, and the easier you make it, the more likely you're going to be able to achieve it. And then secondarily, if you set deadlines that are not just self set,
00:07:00 so not just deadlines that you put on yourself, but deadlines that either come from outside, like your boss or your neighbor or somebody else's holding you to it or your spouse, but also goals that are publicly out there. This is one reason that sharing your fitness goals out in the public can be a good thing for many of us, because then other people began to cheer us on and hold us accountable.
00:07:21 And that social stigma of not working on it actually outweighs our mental emotion of procrastination. And we begin to get it done. We make it where our, basically we begin to use social norms to work for us instead of against us. We begin to recognize the fact that that, that accountability becomes such an important piece of actually achieving those goals. It can be as simple as keeping a spreadsheet.
00:07:50 It can be as simple as setting actual timers. It can be public goals. It can be accountability groups. It can be a daily check in with somebody every morning about, Hey, did you achieve the goals that you said yesterday? What are your goals for today? There's a lot of different ways you can set this up and they'll work different ways for different people because we're all wired differently.
00:08:12 But the truth is there's always ways that you can begin to modify how you view these longer term goals. And by doing that, you can easily begin to achieve them. You can more easily. I'm not going to make a, a lie here and say that it's simple and easy and everything will fall into place. And it all is perfect because it's not that way.
00:08:34 It is work. You have to overcome a certain amount of inertia that your body and your mind has all the time that resist being able to move towards these longterm goals. In fact, that's what it's actually called by another Arthur. And the war of art is the resistance. It's that, that unconscious, that deep inside of ourselves, that part that says stay in bed.
00:09:00 It's warm as opposed to get up and go for that run out on that cold winter morning. If you begin to understand this and recognize some of the ways that you can break it down, then it's much easier to have a more reliable view of time as opposed to an irrational one. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber and listener,
00:09:30 we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you liked this episode on the stewardship of time, be sure to sign up for our stewardship of time tips series, by going to inspired stewardship.com/time or texting four four, two, two, two time tips, and that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time,
00:10:08 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.